[Wikimedia-l] Banners are too bright, too long

[Jon Robson]

>From as I understand it the main problems with the sticky banners seem to
be due to several bugs related to it being sticky. Sticky banners do have a
habit of taking a life of their own and obscuring content. They cause me a
lot of pain as a developer and are hard to get right. The auto expansion on
hover is very confusing and does not meet my expectations as a user of how
it should behave (to the point I came close to raising a bug assuming it
was misbehaving). I also encountered a bug which stopped me from sharing
content [1].

We have to work with facts though and if they perform better we should be
iterating on these banners and improving them so that we still get the
benefits of a shorter fundraiser and do not upset our users. Good work to
everyone involved that has made this fundraiser so successful with that
insight.

I'd be interested to know whether a sticky banner that moves to the side of
the screen out of the way of content as the user scrolls was equally
effective at getting lots of donations and reducing annoyance that some
people have obviously been having. I look forward to seeing more
experimentation.

[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42651